NICK: Korea's return trip

  Seoul, Korea Rep.
Thursday, August 17, 2006

This day was nothing but a race back to the night ferry in Kokura. We started in Seoul, wound our way to the train station, took the bullet train to Pusan, in Pusan we caught a hydrofoil to Hakata.

This adventure I missed since I was asleep: Ashleigh said that the boat stopped dead in the water for a long time during a pretty bad storm. Good thing I sleep like a log. (-: Turned out there was some foreign object stuck on the blade of the hydrofoil, I'm guessing seawead.

After reaching Hakata, thankfully we had no problems getting Ashleigh into the country, but we had a number of issues that tend to come when you lack the currency of the country you are in. After some haggling with a person who spoke Japanese with a Korean accent, we sold him some Won and took the bus to Fukuoka train station, where we needed to catch a Rapid Super duper Limited Express Train to Kokura to catch our night ferry back to Matsuyama.

Whew.

it was exhausting, but we hopped on a train and waited. As soon as we got to the train station, we ran for the ferry, and found that we'd gotten there 30 mins before they were to set sail.

I'll tell you, it's difficult to cover over almost 1000km in one day and make it somewhere with 30 mins to spare. That is called really cutting it close.

We made it to the ferry, slept, and woke up the next morning in Matsuyama. I had to go to work, Ashleigh didn't have to go to work, so her goal for the day was to wait for Claire to come.